Adobe Announces Lightroom Beta, Aperture Competitor

Adobe has announced a new product called Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom offers a tool for professional photographers to import, select, develop and showcase large volumes of digital images.

The software is presently released as a public beta and will expire at the end of June 2006 and is available for download now.

Interestingly, the beta is only available for the Mac at this time.

Adobe Lightroom Beta requires Mac OS X version 10.4.3 (Tiger) or higher, a 1GHz or faster PowerPC G4 or G5 processor (including iBook G4 or PowerBook G4), and 768 MB of RAM (although more is recommended), and 1 GB or more of free hard drive space. Windows requirements will be announced when that version is ready.

MacCentral has some early notes on Lightroom and offers some comparisons with Aperture -- Apple's professional photography tool which was announced in October.